AXFS (Advanced XIP Filesystem) is a compressed read-only file system for Linux, initially developed at Intel, and now maintained at Numonyx. It was designed to use execute in place (XIP) alongside compression aiming to reduce boot and program load times, while retaining a small memory footprint for embedded devices. This is achieved by mixing compressed and uncompressed pages in the same executable file.^[1] AXFS is free software licensed under the GPL.

Cramfs is another read-only compressed file system that supports XIP (with patches); however, it uses a strategy of decompressing entire files, whereas AXFS supports XIP with page granularity.^[2] - this access strategy allows for near-ideal performance in typical (for embedded/compressed filesystems starting an operating system and applications) scenarios.

See also

• Squashfs is another read-only compressed file system
• Cloop is a compressed loopback device module for the Linux kernel
• e2compr provides compression for ext2
• List of file systems
• Comparison of file systems

References

Further reading

• Tony Benavides, Justin Treon, Jared Hulbert and Weide Chang, The Enabling of an Execute-In-Place Architecture to Reduce the Embedded System Memory Footprint and Boot Time, Journal of Computers, Vol. 3, No. 1, Jan 2008, pp. 79–89
• Jared Hulbert, Introducing the Advanced XIP File System Archived 2012-01-13 at the Wayback Machine, (talk) Proceedings of the 2008 Linux Symposium

External links

• AXFS website
• Justin Treon (February 14, 2008) Side by side comparison of launching applications stored in the AXFS, SquashFS, CRAMFS and JFFS2 read-only filing systems. (video)
• "Application eXecute-In-Place (XIP) with Linux and AXFS"

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